The Gorse Blooms Pale

Overview

Dan Davin, one of New Zealand's acknowledged masters of the short story, was born in Invercargill in 1913. The Gorse Blooms Pale gathers together twenty-six stories and a selection of poems reflecting his experiences while growing up in an Irish–New Zealand family in Southland. Comic, haunting, poetic, profound, and lyrical, the stories have a regional flavour quite unlike any other body of work in New Zealand literature. They insightfully capture the character of a close-knit rural community and its post-British social relationships and tribulations, with a flair equal to such other New Zealand writers as Sargeson, Frame, Middleton, or Marshall. The Gorse Blooms Pale is a rare treasure in the landscape of twentieth-century New Zealand literature.

Reviews

'This fine edition of the stories that are perhaps Davin's best offers contemporary readers a chance to experience them as a completed set ... The 'attractive illustrated hardback format ... is appropriate for a definitive edition.' Otago Daily Times, Feb 2008 'The book includes 12 stories from that volume, eight from Breathing Spaces (1975) and six previously uncollected stories ... I hadn't read them before, and I'm grateful to Wilson for re-presenting Davin's yarns about a culture that seeded people like me." – NZ Listener, January 12–18 2008, Vol 212, No 3531 'These 26 stories are so brilliantly crafted that those to whom his writing is new are in for a rare treat, while those familiar with his work can look forward to a renewal of initial pleasure.' – Wairarapa Times-Age, Dec 2007

Author Biography

Dan Davin was a New Zealand Rhodes scholar who became Academic Publisher at the Clarendon Press in Oxford. In his spare time, he wrote both fiction and works of memoir, from his war novel For the Rest of Their Lives (1947) and Southland novels Roads from Home (1949) and No Remittance (1959), to his collection of war stories The Salamander and the Fire (1986). Janet Wilson is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK, and formerly taught at the University of Otago. She has published widely on New Zealand postcolonial/diaspora writers such as Dan Davin, Fleur Adcock, and Katherine Mansfield, and has an interest in globalisation, the short story, and cosmopolitan war fictions. She recently coedited Katherine Mansfield: New directions (2019). She edits the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and convenes the AHRC-funded Diaspora Screen Media Network.